Saturday/Sunday, Jan. 28-29, 2012: Buying jobs and population decline

January 27, 2012 3:27 pm

Buying jobs doesn’t work

Once again, the governing process here in Maine seems to be rather misguided. At one moment, the governor wants to provide money and tax incentives to lure a new aircraft business to Maine if it gets enough state money and tax breaks lavished upon it. That business instead went to Wisconsin and the governor was “upset.”

The governor should be more concerned about the businesses already here in Maine, struggling to pay their unemployment tax costs. Why can’t he help us? For the third year in a row Maine unemployment taxes have been repeatedly hiked up by the state, even though labor costs have actually gone down. Why?

I called the state and was told it needs to make up for the shortfalls resulting from the worldwide economic collapse caused by the federal government.

So even when long-term Maine businesses are hurting, the state puts our costs up, while at the same time offering money to a new company that has never paid one dime of taxes here in Maine.

Making up shortfalls by overtaxing business is damaging to our economic growth. Maybe if there were some tax incentive help, each of the 2,000 Maine businesses could hire one or two more workers and create 2,000 to 4,000 new jobs, vs. the 600 jobs the governor failed to buy.

Instead of raising taxes, Mr. LePage, cut expenses! Maine businesses are currently being bled dry by rising unemployment taxes. That aircraft company evidently did its homework and wisely located elsewhere.

Jim Dickinson

Surry

Population decline’s consequences

It’s hard to believe that Beedy Parker (Jan 10 letter) still believes in the overpopulation myth, while worldwide birthrates are in free-fall. World economies are also in free-fall as their workers fail to replace themselves, while being burdened with supporting aging populations. It takes 2.1 children per couple just to replace existing populations.

Because of 53 million missing Americans since Roe v. Wade, we are also missing trillions of GDP dollars, almost a trillion in tax revenue, all because of the horrible destruction of our most valuable resource of all: human beings.

Eighty countries, representing over half the world’s population, suffer from below replacement fertility. Europe’s birth rate is only 1.3; Germany’s birth dearth caused the closure of 230 schools in 2006. The UN predicts by 2050, Russia’s population will decline by 25 million, Japan’s 21 million, Italy’s 16 million and Germany’s and Spain’s 9 million each. Europe and Japan are projected to lose half their populations by 2100. By 2050, persons over 65 will be almost twice as numerous as children 15 and younger.

The economic consequences of population aging will cause closing schools, shrinking tax revenues, declining stock markets, dying economies ending up like Greece. More caskets than cradles obviously is the problem, not the answer. While Obama dedicates hundreds of millions of tax dollars to economy-destroying population reduction worldwide, poorer Americans are forced to choose among eating, medicine or freezing.